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labricoleuseI have a few more books to address with respect to this semester's topics, and these relate to the "reshaping the actor" and hypothetical engineering projects.
The first is Puppetry: A World History by Eileen Blumenthal. This is a large-format book with both tons of text and lots of full-color and B&W photographs. It is a general overview of many kinds of puppetry (from marionettes to shadow puppets to bunraku to multiple-operator macropuppets in various cultures), and discusses not only elements of structural engineering but cultural significance as well. I keep it in the class library as a reference for some of the hypothetical engineering projects, in case a student wants to do something like a five-person Chinese Dragon or a parade-style macropuppet, etc.
Another book i always make available is edited by Blumenthal, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. This year, i've got the updated 2006 version, which includes some of her recent film work, as well as the 2006 opera Grendel. (The previous edition was from 1996, and stopped at her staging of The Green Bird.) It's a coffeetable-book-style retrospective of her career, mostly photos of productions in full-color, but also featuring many of her design renderings, some behind-the-scenes pix, and a few diagrams of some of the less intuitive structures (like the one-person cheetahs from Lion King which are waist-mounted and utilize the puppeteer's legs as the animal's hind legs). I keep this one around for mask class as well.
Speaking of Lion King, Taymor's production diary/scrapbook, The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway is another excellent (though clearly production-specific) resource for creative puppetry structures. Whereas Playing with Fire has maybe 3-4 pages on the Lion King process, Pride Rock on Broadway is crammed with structural diagrams and maquette photos and matrix sculpture images, even to the point of including an actual structural blueprint for the hydraulic mechanism inside the hyperextending head-mounted "Scar" mask. It's a great resource, particularly given how many designers tend to find inspiration in Taymor's work, and want things made "like that one costume in Lion King."
Another new book i was super excited to come across is Journey of the Tall Horse: A Story of African Theatre by Mervyn Millar. This book is essentially about the genesis of the acclaimed Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, and specifically their fantastic production Tall Horse, about the journey of a giraffe from the savannah of Africa to the menagerie of King Charles X of France in 1826. (If you follow this sort of thing, you'll maybe recognize Handspring from their most recent production, War Horse, which opened at Britain's National Theatre last year and is still running.) It's mostly a history, so it's largely text, but VERY image-heavy, nearly every page has a production photo, a design rendering, a behind-the-scenes snapshot, or a structural diagram of one of the multitudinous puppets. It's particularly cool to compare and contrast Handspring's two-operator giraffe puppet with Taymor's single-operator giraffe design depicted in the Pride Rock book!
Random thought: It's weird to consider chronology with respect to these courses, since i teach them on a biennial basis. I've taught this once before, and it'll come around again in Fall of 2011. Each time, i have six students--if i stay here for the remainder of my career, how many students will learn these subjects from me in the fullness of time? I guess if i keep on teaching and don't get hit by a bus or something before i'm elderly, i could teach as many as, what? 150 students in a given topic? Maybe as many as 200? And of course there's my commitment to "open source costuming" through conduits like this blog.
That's a lot of paying it forward. Cool!
The first is Puppetry: A World History by Eileen Blumenthal. This is a large-format book with both tons of text and lots of full-color and B&W photographs. It is a general overview of many kinds of puppetry (from marionettes to shadow puppets to bunraku to multiple-operator macropuppets in various cultures), and discusses not only elements of structural engineering but cultural significance as well. I keep it in the class library as a reference for some of the hypothetical engineering projects, in case a student wants to do something like a five-person Chinese Dragon or a parade-style macropuppet, etc.
Another book i always make available is edited by Blumenthal, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire. This year, i've got the updated 2006 version, which includes some of her recent film work, as well as the 2006 opera Grendel. (The previous edition was from 1996, and stopped at her staging of The Green Bird.) It's a coffeetable-book-style retrospective of her career, mostly photos of productions in full-color, but also featuring many of her design renderings, some behind-the-scenes pix, and a few diagrams of some of the less intuitive structures (like the one-person cheetahs from Lion King which are waist-mounted and utilize the puppeteer's legs as the animal's hind legs). I keep this one around for mask class as well.
Speaking of Lion King, Taymor's production diary/scrapbook, The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway is another excellent (though clearly production-specific) resource for creative puppetry structures. Whereas Playing with Fire has maybe 3-4 pages on the Lion King process, Pride Rock on Broadway is crammed with structural diagrams and maquette photos and matrix sculpture images, even to the point of including an actual structural blueprint for the hydraulic mechanism inside the hyperextending head-mounted "Scar" mask. It's a great resource, particularly given how many designers tend to find inspiration in Taymor's work, and want things made "like that one costume in Lion King."
Another new book i was super excited to come across is Journey of the Tall Horse: A Story of African Theatre by Mervyn Millar. This book is essentially about the genesis of the acclaimed Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, and specifically their fantastic production Tall Horse, about the journey of a giraffe from the savannah of Africa to the menagerie of King Charles X of France in 1826. (If you follow this sort of thing, you'll maybe recognize Handspring from their most recent production, War Horse, which opened at Britain's National Theatre last year and is still running.) It's mostly a history, so it's largely text, but VERY image-heavy, nearly every page has a production photo, a design rendering, a behind-the-scenes snapshot, or a structural diagram of one of the multitudinous puppets. It's particularly cool to compare and contrast Handspring's two-operator giraffe puppet with Taymor's single-operator giraffe design depicted in the Pride Rock book!
Random thought: It's weird to consider chronology with respect to these courses, since i teach them on a biennial basis. I've taught this once before, and it'll come around again in Fall of 2011. Each time, i have six students--if i stay here for the remainder of my career, how many students will learn these subjects from me in the fullness of time? I guess if i keep on teaching and don't get hit by a bus or something before i'm elderly, i could teach as many as, what? 150 students in a given topic? Maybe as many as 200? And of course there's my commitment to "open source costuming" through conduits like this blog.
That's a lot of paying it forward. Cool!
